Re: AnyCard project

[salfter@salfter.diespammersdie.dyndns.org (Scott Alfter)]

In article <41CFD0D6.5050408@spurgeon.net>,
Mike Spurgeon  <mike@spurgeon.net> wrote:
>Mike Spurgeon wrote:
>
>> And she got a nice write up in the business section of today's 
>> Sacramento Bee, about the Commodore-64 Joystick...
>
>Oops.  Here's a URL for another copy of the same writeup:
>
>http://techzonez.com/comments.php?shownews=11532

The link in that article has gone bad unless you're reading it with Lynx (or
some other browser that'll ignore meta-refresh).  Saving the article within
Lynx yields the following:

Commodore 64 reincarnated on a chip
Published: December 20, 2004, 6:03 AM PST
By John Markoff
The New York Times

YAMHILL, Ore.--There is a story behind every electronic gadget sold on the
QVC shopping channel. This one leads to a ramshackle farmhouse in rural
Oregon, which is the home and circuit design lab of Jeri Ellsworth, a
30-year-old high school dropout and self-taught computer chip designer.

Ellsworth has squeezed the entire circuitry of a two-decade-old Commodore 64
home computer onto a single chip, which she has tucked neatly into a
joystick that connects by a cable to a TV set. Called the Commodore 64--the
same as the computer system--her device can run 30 video games, mostly
sports, racing and puzzles games from the early 1980s, all without the
hassle of changing game cartridges.

She has also included five hidden games and other features--not found on the
original Commodore computer--that only a fellow hobbyist would be likely to
appreciate. For instance, someone who wanted to turn the device into an
improved version of the original machine could modify it to add a keyboard,
monitor and disk drive.

Sold by Mammoth Toys, based in New York, for $30, the Commodore 64 joystick
has been a hot item on QVC this Christmas season, selling 70,000 units in
one day when it was introduced on the shopping channel last month; since
then it has been sold through QVC's Web site. Frank Landi, president of
Mammoth, said he expected the joystick would be distributed next year by
bigger toy and electronics retailers like Radio Shack, Best Buy, Sears and
Toys "R" Us. "To me, any toy that sells 70,000 in a day on QVC is a good
indication of the kind of reception we can expect," he said.

Ellworth's first venture into toy making has not yet brought her great
wealth--she said she is paid on a consulting basis at a rate that is
competitive for her industry--"but I'm having fun," she said, and she
continues with other projects in circuit design as a consultant.

Her efforts in reverse-engineering old computers and giving them new life
inside modern custom chips has already earned her a cult following among
small groups of "retro" personal computer enthusiasts, as well as broad
respect among the insular world of the original computer hackers who created
the first personal computers three decades ago. (The term "hacker" first
referred to people who liked to design and create machines, and only later
began to be applied to people who broke into them.)

More significant, perhaps, is that in an era of immensely complicated
computer systems, huge factories and design teams that stretch across
continents, Ellsworth is demonstrating that the spirit that once led from
Silicon Valley garages to companies like Hewlett-Packard and Apple Computer
can still thrive.

"She's a pure example of following your interests and someone who won't
accept that you can't do it," said Lee Felsenstein, the designer of the
first portable PC and an original member of the Homebrew Computer Club. "She
is someone who can do it and do it brilliantly."

Ellsworth said that chip design was an opportunity to search for elegance in
simplicity. She takes her greatest pleasure in examining a complex computer
circuit and reducing it in cost and size by cleverly reusing basic
electronic building blocks. It is a skill that is as much art as science,
but one that Ellsworth has perfected, painstakingly refining her talent by
plunging deeply into the minutiae of computer circuit design.

Recently she interrupted a conversation with a visitor in her home to hunt
in between the scattered circuit boards and components in her living room
for a 1971 volume, "MOS Integrated Circuits," which she frequently consults.
The book concerns an earlier chip technology based on fewer transistors than
are used today. "I look for older texts," she said. "A real good designer
needs to know how the old stuff works."

Several years ago, Ellsworth cornered Stephen Wozniak, co-founder of Apple
Computer, at a festival for vintage Apple computers and badgered him for the
secrets of his Apple II floppy disk controller.

"I was very impressed with her knowledge of all this stuff, and her
interest, too," recalled Wozniak, whose fascination with hobbyist computers
three decades ago helped create the personal computer industry.

She attributes her passion for design simplicity to her youth in Dallas,
Ore., 35 miles south of Yamhill, where she was raised by her father, Jim
Ellsworth, a mechanic who owned the local Mobil station.

She became a computer hobbyist early, begging her father at age 7 to let her
use a Commodore 64 computer originally purchased for her brother, and then
learning to program it by reading the manuals that came with the machine.

In a tiny rural town without access even to a surplus electronics store, her
best sources of parts were the neighborhood ham radio operators. She learned
to make the most of her scarce resources.

"It goes back to necessity," she said. "It went back to not having enough
parts to design with when I was a kid."

Her first business foray came during high school when she began designing
and selling the dirt-track race cars that she had been driving with her
farther. Using his service station as a workshop, she was soon making so
much money selling her custom race cars that she dropped out of high school.

It was fun for several years, she said, but eventually she decided that she
needed to get away from the race car scene. A friend had an early Intel
486-based PC and thought they could make money assembling and selling
computers. She decided he was right: "I looked at the margins and it seemed
like a great way to make money."

They went into business together in 1995, but soon had a falling out and
split up. For a short time, Ellsworth considered leaving the computer
business. Instead, she opened a store near that of her former partner, then
drove him out of business. Ultimately, her store became a chain of five
Computers Made Easy shops in small towns.

"My business model was to find areas that were far enough away from the big
cities where the larger stores were," she said. "I could generate a lot of
loyalty and charge a bit more. It worked out well for quite a while."

Eventually, the collapsing price of the PC made it impossible to survive,
she said, and in 2000 she sold off her stores.

"When the machines got down to $75 margins, then even putting a technician
on the phone to answer a question meant you were almost losing money," she
said.

Free from her business obligations, she decided to return to her first
love--hobbyist electronics. She was eager to study computer hardware design,
but soon found that there weren't many options for a high school dropout.

She moved to Walla Walla, Wash., and began attending Walla Walla College, a
Seventh Day Adventist school that offered a circuit design program. Her
attempt at a formal education lasted less than a year, however. She was a
cultural mismatch for the school, where she said questioning the professors'
answers was frowned upon.

"I felt like a wolf in sheep's clothing," she said.

On her own again, Ellsworth decided to pursue her passion, designing
computer circuits that mimicked the behavior of her first Commodore. She
turned to a series of mentors and availed herself of free software design
tools offered by chip companies.

Her hobby produced a chameleon computer called the C-1. Changing its basic
software could make it mimic not only a Commodore 64, but ultimately more
than nine other popular home computers of the early 1980's, including the
Atari, TI, Vic and Sinclair.

Two years ago she showed it off at the Hackers' Conference, an annual
meeting of some of the nation's best computer designers. To her surprise,
she received a rousing ovation--and a series of job offers.

One person who took notice was Andrew Singer, a computer scientist who is
chief executive of Rapport, a start-up based in Mountain View, Calif.

Singer contracted with Ellsworth as a consultant and has since found that
she has abilities that engineers with advanced degrees often do not.

"It's possible to get a credential and not have passion," he said. He
compared Ellsworth to Wozniak and to Burrell Smith, the hardware designer of
the original Macintosh. Neither had formal training when they made their
most significant contributions at Apple.

Ellsworth was also discovered by Mammoth toys, which hired her to design the
Commodore-emulating chip for the joystick. She began the project late last
June and finished, including a frantic last-minute trip to a Chinese
manufacturing factory, in early September--a design sprint fueled by
Mountain Dew and 20-hour days.

"It worked out tremendously well for our company," said Landi, president of
Mammoth. "It has entirely changed the way we design electronic toys." He
said that he has signed Ellsworth up for a series of design projects,
although he would not divulge the financial details.

Old-fashioned video games like the ones on Ellsworth's product have become
less common recently because kids have grown jaded and expect a "wow"
factor, like intense graphics and realistic images that older computers
could not produce, said Shyam Nagrani, principal consumer electronics
analyst for iSuppli, a market research company based in El Segundo, Calif.
He added, however, "The parents are likely to pick this up and say, 'Why
not? The kids may like it.'"

When the C64, as the joystick is called informally, appeared on QVC last
month, Ellsworth watched with obvious pride.

"It was one of one of the best projects I've ever done in my life," she
said. "It was a tribute back to the computer that started it all for me."